Amazon Discover Spring Technology Participant Review

Panellist talks about the day in the lift of software engineers, interviewers discussing what they look for and dispelling myths of the application process, and showing the different affinity groups that exist at the company. There was also a workshop on soft skills, as well as how to do the coding test, and a workshop that ran throughout the event where technical (programming skills) were developed through individual and group exercises.

Developed an understanding of unit testing in code, and a new appreciation for object-oriented programming.

The insight event was geared to those applying for the Software Development Engineer internship, so other roles, while discussed briefly during introductions, were not mentioned in great detail. It would also have been great if the different areas of software development projects and teams could have been discussed a little bit more.

It seemed very collaborative, where people are not afraid to ask each other questions about their problems in their job, or simply help on how to write certain types of emails. It seems quite friendly, and their work seems to keep them very busy as well.

I greatly enjoyed the experience. It was a wonderful eye-opener to what it is like working in Amazon, and what skills you need to develop in order to be successful there. It also made me a lot more confident in my programming skills despite not coming from a computer science background.

Yes

Make sure you know an object-oriented programming language (for example, I used python) as the workshops will feel a lot more difficult if you do not. Programming experience makes the workshop a lot more worthwhile, but you do not have to be an expert at all. Just knowing the foundations of the language should be good enough to participate, though more may be needed to get through the application process.